out of the darkness, into the light: March 2010

Here are three recent reviews, all for the Gaudie. I wrote all of these the same morning and so the theme of them is obscure references, subtle nods of the head, something I'm increasingly obsessed with in reviews. There are many, and I hope you spot them all. If you do, you're very good. Some are obvious, others less so. Tough ones to spot: Christina Rosetti, Alan Bennett and of course an (implicit, we're all aware of the explicit) Wittgenstein.

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First up, review of Ellie Goulding album, Lights. This was rejected because of my comments about her guitar-playing. Apparently she's an expert folk guitarist, and so I can't say that the guitar sounds like a superficial addition. I don't totally see this, but nevertheless I didn't get my revision in before the deadline.

British female solo artists are in the same position right now as British male indie bands are. They have no idea who they are. They have a mish-mash of influences with no concrete foundation or clear idea of what they want to be. Ellie Goulding is a good example of this post-Lily Allen type of songstress, who wants to be all things at all times to all people. She is at different points La Roux, Florence Welch, Laura Marling, and Shakira. You can even occasionally hear strains of The Knife. This is what you’d expect of someone who won a poll of bloggers’ views of what would be the ‘sound of 2010’, bloggers not being known for the consistency of their views.

A constant undercurrent on the album is Ellie’s amateur acoustic guitar strumming, which has synths piled on top of it, which are then stripped back in sparse moments to expose the guitar again, as if she’s afraid to just be a popstar-and what better, quicker, easier way to appear creative and quirky is there than an acoustic guitar? The acoustic is an indie comfort blanket, and it should be disposed of.

If Ellie just went off in one concise, predicated direction, she would be amazing. At times, I was reminded of bassline, that amazing genre from a few years back which no one remembers, which was all about hushed feminine voices and synths sloshing about beneath. In a Meinongian parallel universe, there is probably a bassline artist called Ellie Goulding, and a mega-popstar called Ellie Goulding, and a hard-trance artist called Ellie Goulding, and they’ll ALL be amazing. But in our grim universe, we just have the mid-point, the misty-eyed one that’s in between all of them, and satisfies no one fully by attempting to satisfy everyone a little bit.

The lyrics are generic and blunt, a reversion to pop norms; diamonds , stars and soft skin. This is no bad thing-pop lyrics are at their heartwarming best when they are generic. Like all great pop music, the lyrics look awful on paper but in the song they sound as profound as can be. But as a whole the album’s flimsy and non-committing. One thing is true though. Stuff like this probably will be the sound of 2010, and it’s at least better than a few years ago when the Kooks were the sound of our times.

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Here's a review of the new Joanna Newsom album, Have One on Me. I'm astounded and pleased that they didn't edit out the Zen Baseballbat reference...

Every Joanna Newsom album is like a book. Along with Boy in Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal, I Am the Champion Concrete Mixer by Zen Baseballbat and Untrue by Burial, Ys, her previous album, was one of the seminal classic albums of our century so far, taking music forward in a totally new direction, giving our generation an identity of our own. It was a beautiful, pastoral expanse of lyricism, a true book of an album, which had to be appreciated in its entirety, as it lowered you into its own world.

Have One on Me similarly is no holiday paperback, it’s a huge slab of thick paper to churn through in instalments, willing yourself on, knowing it will be worth it, eventually. It’s Middlemarch. Many people talk about Newsom as if she is some Middle Ages revivalist, because she plays a harp and sings about farming. But this is the product of lack of imagination. There is nothing ‘rural’ about this music, it is not a mediaeval time capsule just because it features a harp. Rather, it is music that spans centuries of history. One moment, Elizabethan recorders are whistling out a baroque dance, next it shifts into 20s cabaret, then off into folk. Every genre, age, emotion, rhythm, and sensation is expressed at one point or another during the album.

The music itself is huge; expansive, wide open fields and rolling hills of sound over three discs. The lyrics are opulent and drawn out, the individual words, nevermind lyrics, being hard to pinpoint the beginning and end of. In Newsomland, ‘difference’ is an octosyllabic word. The lyrics are not the flurry of imagery and bewildering beauty of Ys, though. They are equally beautiful, but simpler and more personal, addressed to a lover rather than tales of animals and folktales. The overall feeling you get from the lyrics is a woman tossed about by the complexities of love, attempting to anchor herself with poetry. Her voice is clear as a bell, thawing from indignant, stroppy quacking into soft, naked whispers, rising up and thronging in the air with the cherubim and the seraphim.

I first listened to this album as I tried to walk to Aberdeen beach at night on my own, and got lost in the little hills and sodden crevices of the golf course, confused and blown about by the drawn-out songs. At first listen, it would lose anyone. But with persistent listening, it opens up its concealed charm as it spreads out into beautiful bloom. So many of these songs make you stop and stare into the middle distance with a comatose grin on your face, like when you stumble across something in a book you thought particular to you. It is a private album, one of the longest and most beautiful love letters of all time, an album of bleakness and weakness, confessions and professions of love, celebrations, joy, tantrums and screams, and it is a modern classic by a true treasure of our age.

This is so good:

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And lastly, the big one. Alice in Wonderland. This was brutally cropped, at the 'why does everything have to involve fighting and sex?' line they ran out of room and just didn't include the rest of the review, which is mind-blowing. But also good, as it meant they didn't cut out the stuff about Wittgenstein (which was surely prime for a cut if they didn't have room)(it isn't even strictly true, Ludder's fav book was actually Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief, but I choose to ignore that as I haven't read it and it doesn't fit in with what I want to say)(I mean he did really love Alice in Wonderland, and reread it several times, it's not like I've plucked it from nowhere)(his favourite character was the mock turtle, and it's easy and pleasurable to see why). Nevertheless.

Alice in Wonderland is a book about many things and nothing. It’s been given several critical appraisals and has been variously seen as a Freudian work, an allegory of the British Empire, a confession of Lewis Carroll’s paedophilia, and the first (and surely only) avant-garde maths book. It is an intellectually fascinating text for both children and adults as it was written by a true polymath. Lewis Carroll was a children’s writer, but Charles Dodgson was an Oxford logician, and the book predates many 20th Century ideas in philosophy of language (we don’t have time to go into these now, but trust me, it does). Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favourite book was Alice in Wonderland, for instance. It’s all sense and nonsense intertwining. He was big on that.

Really though, the book’s just mere nonsense, but if it’s about anything at all it’s about the struggle to preserve British values and etiquette in spite of unerringly confident absurdity. Alice is precocious and prickly in the face of warped insanity all around her, and when she attempts to restore order to the mad, her own manners seem even more ridiculous, pre-empting the 1960s surrealist parody of Englishness by the psychedelic movement. But largely, the book is just nonsense. It was the first children’s book to be written without any moral whatsoever, the only intention being to entertain children.

The best film versions of Alice keep this in mind and just allow it to be pure, silly frivolity. But not this film. Because it’s Tim Burton, everything has to be dark and nasty, everything has to be rotten and subversive, everything has to involve Helena Bonham Carter. Alice is not a child, she is a 19 year old on the verge of an arranged marriage, and at the proposal flees back to Wonderland (or ‘Underland’ as it’s needlessly called) to find it in ruins under the tyrannical rule of the Red Queen (like many things in the film, a composite of characters from both original Alice books). Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter veers constantly between two personalities and corresponding accents-English, and nice, or Scottish, and evil. There is a quasi-sexual relationship between the Queen and the Knave, and the Knave tries to get Alice to submit to his advances .There is a huge battle at the end in which Alice slays a dragon. Why does everything have to involve fighting and sex?

The film is instantly forgettable as it has no imagination and, despite being such a controversial film in many ways, takes absolutely no risks. Taking a risk would be sticking to the text in this instance, but instead what Burton and Disney have done is revert to the Hollywood archetype of an epic quest with daffy characters and a heartwarming ending. In the books, they always end with an abrupt reversion to normal life, and the fantasy is left as a dream, but here, Alice goes on to become an apprentice in a proto-colonial trading company (seriously).

The filmmakers appear to believe heavy CGI and 3D effects are synonymous with genuine magic and wonder and, if these are taken care of, the plot can just be ordinary sword-swiping nonsense. But Alice in Wonderland begs for plain old patent nonsense. They’ve missed this fact, to their peril. Also, Johnny Depp break dances to funk music at the end of the film. That says it all, really.

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I don't want to post a video relating the above film, so let's just revisit this classic shall we: